The second series of The Fifteen Billion Pound Railway (BBC2), originally shown in May 2017, was subtitled The Final Countdown. The third, which concluded last night, might plausibly have been called The Absolute Last You’ll Hear From Us on the Subject of Crossrail. But in the end they didn’t risk a subtitle, holding out the possibility that another series might be squeezed out before London’s much-delayed new underground service opens.
The final episode was, understandably, inconclusive. In last week’s programme, engineers fitting out what is now called the Elizabeth line were still reckoning with a December 2018 opening date; this week the prospect of an autumn 2019 completion was already receding. And the £15bn railway has now become a £17bn railway.
The series has always been about massive feats of engineering undertaken with quiet insouciance, so the delays added a jarring note to the background hum of triumph. The narration (from an increasingly ominous Julian Barratt) spoke of “borrowed time” and referred to Crossrail as “the embattled flagship engineering project”, but all the people who appeared on screen remained calm and confident. Someone somewhere must have been pulling their hair out, but we didn’t see it.
The first series focused on the drilling of giant tunnels; the second on the construction of vast stations. This one dealt with the final fiddly bits, the manoeuvring of large pieces of kit into small spaces without scraping the sides. A £65m escalator was divided into 13 sections in order to get it down into Tottenham Court Road station. Over at Paddington, with large steel beams being edged past very old walls, 28-year-old site manager Cynthia Mynhardt casually mentioned that the penalties for damaging a listed building included the possibility of prison.
As ever, much of the pleasure to be derived from this documentary came from watching the work of people with jobs you’ve never heard of. One person was described as a “dynamic testing manager”, a title that sounds like its own performance review: you, sir, are a dynamic, if testing, manager. Most cable pullers, we learned, come from Hartlepool, and their profession involves threading many tons of fat, heavy cable – every metre weighs 18kg – through dark and forbidding spaces, the sort of thing people get up to in their most frustrating nightmares.
Back at Paddington, banksman Eddy Bennan was hard at work doing something I had to look up. A banksman, it transpires, is someone who directs the operation of a crane from a position near where the loads are picked up and put down. In this case, Bennan was guiding the arrival of giant steel pillars on to their bolts, inch by sodding inch. “You carry on lifting like that,” he told his crane operator, “you and me are gonna fall in love.” That must be the most unsettling version of “well done” I’ve ever encountered.
The programme ended where it began: with the powering up of the new Tottenham Court Road station for the first time. “Won’t be no bangs, hopefully,” said the electrician before the green button was pushed, flooding the station with enough juice to power 8,000 homes.
I have nothing but admiration for people who can spend all day fitting enormous glass roof panels in high winds without crying, but it was hard not to feel that the drama of the Crossrail project had long since shifted offstage, perhaps to an office where blame was being apportioned, and somebody who deserved it was getting screamed at: ideally Chris Grayling, the transport secretary.
There was no mention, for example, of the untimely liquidation of the construction firm Carillion, which had been contracted to do a lot of the work. The series remained steadfast in its determination to impress, and finding all the drama it needed in the possibility of an escalator not fitting, even though we knew it would in the end. I can’t imagine how little interest this sort of thing holds for someone who lives in, say, Wales.
Ultimately we were left with the news that the revised completion date of autumn 2019 has been deemed “overambitious”, and the Elizabeth line may not open until 2020. So I think we can expect at least one more series – The Seventeen Billion Pound Railway: Painting and Snagging. By the time it airs, my train had better have arrived.
